03/18/2026
We parent from somewhere. And until we know where, our children often carry what we haven’t yet faced.
This is a familiar idea in theory and a surprisingly difficult one to work with in practice. Parent work is where many of us feel least sure of ourselves: uncertain how to engage what a parent brings without either managing it or getting lost in it, unsure how to be useful without becoming directive, and quietly aware that what the parent stirs in us is itself clinical information we don’t always know how to use. Many of us were trained to work with the child. The parent, their history, their blind spots, and their grief is often where our confidence runs out.
This workshop is for those clinicians.
Join psychoanalyst and educator Eileen Paris, Ph.D. for a full-day experiential workshop exploring the relational foundations of parenting and what gets in the way. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic theory, somatic awareness, and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Paris guides clinicians through the dynamics that most profoundly organize the parent-child relationship: intergenerational transmission, projective identification, somatic enactment, and the unconscious ways a parent’s own developmental history shapes what they perceive in their child...and what they cannot yet see.
At the heart of this work is a problem clinicians encounter constantly but don’t always have language for: a parent who cannot quite see their child. Not because they don’t love them, but because their own history is in the way; filtering their child’s behavior through the lens of their own unresolved experience, and making it genuinely difficult to distinguish what the child needs from what the parent fears, expects, or cannot bear. Learning to recognize this dynamic and to open a genuine reflective dialogue with parents about it is among the most transformative skills a child clinician can develop.
